[ODE] newbie question -- ode orientation matrices and quats

[Chris Calef]

A question from an ODE newbie --

I just started using it, am absolutely ecstatic, but
am having problems communicating with other
applications. This question may be out of scope,
because it may have more to do with 3ds max and povray
than ode, but the fact that I can't make it work in
either app makes me wonder if it is something strange
about ODE.

What I've been trying to do is save the positions and
orientations of objects in my ODE simulation to frames
that can be used for static animations, for game
characters.

What I did was every few frames, write out the matrix
or quaternion (I tried both), and the position, of
each object in my simulation.  Then I used maxScript
to read that in to 3ds max (using the quaternion
version, because from the max docs it appears that you
can't set the object's local orientation matrix
directly).  The positions worked fine, of course, but
the orientations never worked, it looked like they
were getting close but they never quite lined up with
what they should have been.

I then tried the same thing in povray, using the
matrix from dBodyGetRotation (trying about every
possible permutation of ways the matrix could be
organized).  Still no luck.

I understand that this is a pretty vague question, but
I'm just wondering if there is some core weird thing
about how ODE handles orientations that could solve my
problems.  Thanks to everyone who's worked on ODE, it
is BEAUTIFUL!!

Chris Calef


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree